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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29761602">Beetle Mania</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley'>William_Easley</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Gravity Falls</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Humor, excruciating puns, land before swine, sap</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 23:55:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>16,933</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29761602</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Mystery Twins, Soos, and Stan rescued Waddles from the Jurassic Sap Hole, Mabel and Stan were more or less covered with sap. As they recruit Wendy's help (her dad knows how to remove the sticky stuff), Mabel discovers that a small passenger was stuck behind her ear. She decides to keep it as a pet, and their problems start to multiply.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Beetle Mania</strong>
</p><p>
  <em> <strong>(An Untold Gravity Falls Episode from July 2012)</strong> </em>
</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>1</strong>
</p><p>It is said, on not entirely trustworthy authority, that a member of the religious press once asked the renowned British biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "Sir, from your studies of living things, what can you deduce about the personality of the Creator?"</p><p>Haldane pondered a moment and then said, "He has an inordinate fondness for beetles."</p><p>Ah, beetles, as Stanford would have told you had he not, in June 2012, been engaged in a between-the-dimensions struggle to locate and confront Bill Cipher with a recently created weapon, the quantum destabilizer—</p><p>But he was, so he couldn't, so I will: Beetles are an ancient form of insect in the order <em>Coleoptera, </em>constituting about forty per cent of all known insects and who knows how big a percentage of the unknown ones.</p><p>Put your hand down, smartass, you're wrong anyway. The point is that they're <em>unknown</em>, so I know you can't know the answer, you know? Right. Where were we?</p><p>Beetles. There are gazillions of them and they're everywhere. It is speculated (that is, an etymologist—that looks wrong, hang on half a tick, I'll get the dictionary)—correction, an entomologist (a person who studies the origin and habits of insects) one day just sort of idly thought, "Flowers. Insects. Is there a relationship?"</p><p>Well, yeah. The idea is—<em>please</em> put your hand down. What? Etymologist? It turns out that's a person who studies the origin and habits of words, satisfied?</p><p>The IDEA, as I began, is that for some reason a rather plain and homely aquatic plant thought to itself about 130 million years ago, "You know what? I'd attract more pollen spreaders if I had something nice to wear." And eventually it popped out a tiny little flower.</p><p>At that moment, the primitive proto-insects said, "Hot damn, a flower!" And the flowers and the insects created a perfect orgy of interspecies groping and twisting and thrusting, tickling, and nuzzling and the flower asked the beetle with its pistil to ask again yes and then he asked her would she yes to say yes my mountain flower and first she put her petals around him yes and drew him down so he could feel her stamens all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes she said, yes I will yes.</p><p>That's how it started, and the rest is science. The efforts were much like, one might say, the birds and the bees. Go to bed now, my darling, and sweet dreams. What do you mean, you're scared of sex? Get over it. EVERYBODY's scared of sex.</p><p>Well, anyhow, you know how plants are, those copycats. As soon as the OTHER plants saw what little Miss Floral Pants was up to, they hatched up their own flowers, and the beetles, rising to the challenge, said to each other, "You go get those red ones, I'm going for the yellow," and before you could say "Jack Robinson" if you pronounced it perhaps one syllable every thirty million years, there came an explosion of beetles. And each species of beetle developed a taste for a different food.</p><p>All different kinds of beetles, all hungry, and all looking for that thing they want to eat but they just don't know what it is, like you on a date, you know, "You feel like Chinese?" "Not really. How about Greek?" "Not in the mood. Um, burgers?" "We had burgers last time," and after an hour of fruitless back-and-forth, there's nothing for it but to go park on a lover's lane and forget about food for a while. The primitive beetles were like that, with less snogging and more gorging.</p><p>Here's the thing about the diets of beetles: By this point in their existence, they will eat just about anything. In the northern forests of Europe, beetles dine on Norwegian wood. In beleaguered beehives all round the globe, bees must contend with invading beetles who have developed a taste for honey. Some thrive on sour milk, see?</p><p>In Mexico, one type of beetle wolfs down cayenne as if it weren't cayenne. Some beetles are scavengers of the dead, detecting the aromas of roadkill animals from enormous distances and showing up for dinner without a reservation. It is said that when one of Queen Mary's ponies died, she gave it an elaborate funeral, only to discover the very next morning that the grave had sunken two feet because so many carrion beetles had shown up to dig a pony.</p><p>The onion borer of New Jersey is a smallish beetle, one of which can creep into a two-inch diameter onion and completely hollow it out in one night, leaving behind only the delicate outer skin, looking like a glass onion. One species loves to nibble on lead, of all things—the metal, not the graphite in a pencil, but other types feast on paper, filling with despair the heart of many a paperback writer.</p><p>The fiber-eating <em>Dermestes amandifilum </em>may be flying high above a cultivated farm in the Ganges delta, and may look down, spy a flourishing patch of specialized mallow grown for the fibers from which burlap, hessian cloth, and other textiles are made. The beetle cries out happily, "Hey! Jute!" and buzzes down to decimate the jute trade.</p><p>Some beetles are so small they give meeny-miney ants a run for their miney. One exceedingly tiny "skin beetle," as it is called, likes to creep about on living humans, devouring dead skin cells. A person usually does not notice them if only two are three are present, but sometimes as many as five thousand will be grazing around inside some unfortunate person's clothing. You can identify the sufferer by they way they twist and shout, trying to relieve the itch.</p><p>But you get the point. The world is slopping over with beetles. So who needs one more, right?</p><p>Let us glissando into the scene as Soos, Dipper (the Pterodactyl Bros), a sleepy Mabel, and a secret-concealing Stan return from having retrieved Waddles from the Jurassic Sap Hole and leaving behind Old Man McGucket, who as far as they know at this point was eaten alive by a baby pterodactyl and was a goner. He wasn't, because fortunately he had his playing spoons in his overalls pocket. He ate days a week to get out of that thing.</p><p>As the gang drove toward the Shack, Stan and Mabel were covered in sap—not enough to preserve them, but enough to be unbelievably annoying. Soap didn't much help. Soos helpfully suggested boiling water, and Stan was willing to give it a try, but Dipper luckily nixed the idea.</p><p>"Who would know how to get rid of this stuff?" Mabel complained, pulling an orange handful of sap off her face, as if her cheek and hand were having a taffy pull.</p><p>"Wendy!" Dipper exclaimed. "I'll get her! I mean, I'll go for her. I mean, I'll ask her! Not to go on a date, I mean! But ask her! To tell us how her dad gets rid of sap! Hah! Good save. Nobody knows what I was thinking!"</p><p>Dipper asked Soos to drive him over to the Corduroy house, where Wendy was mending the roof. She put the last nails in a cedar shingle, climbed down the ladder, and said, "Thanks for relieving the boredom, guys. My dad and brothers are off camping, and they left me home with the woman's work. What's up?"</p><p>"If you had sticky sap stuck on you, how would you remove it?" Dipper asked.</p><p>"That's a weirdly specific kind of casual banter," she said. When he turned red, she punched his shoulder lightly. "Just messin' with you, man! Sap, huh? What kind?"</p><p>"From a tree, dude!" Soos said.</p><p>Wendy nodded. "Yeah, that narrows it down."</p><p>Dipper explained how they had encountered the sticky stuff and where. "Out by the old ruined church, huh?" she asked. "Hey, maybe our gang will go explore that place! That would be radical. Wanna come with?"</p><p>"Uh," Dipper said, "mainly I want to find out how to get sap off."</p><p>"Cool. Let me stow the ladder and the toolbox, and I'll ride over with you. Mind if I put my bike in the truck, Soos?"</p><p>"Better a bicycle than an icicle!" Soos said cheerfully. When Wendy gave him a puzzled look, he said, "Because if it was the other way, see, it would be real cold on your, um. Uh." He chuckled and said, "Oh, man I don't know where I was going with that!"</p><p>They returned to the Shack around sunset. Inside, Wendy examined the patients. "Wow, dudes," she said. "Did you like go <em>swimming</em> in the stuff?"</p><p>"It was in this cave," Stan said, standing on the porch with his arms straight out from his sides. Not that he was posing, but he didn't want the stuff to ruin his suit any more than it had already. "It's full of fossilized sap, what do you call the stuff?"</p><p>"Amber," Dipper said.</p><p>"Yeah, what the kid said." Stan shrugged, difficult when you're in a scarecrow pose. "Anywho, you couldn't hardly walk without gettin' the goo on you. It was like tryin' to cross Amber-y Road or some deal!"</p><p>"Well," Wendy said, after having examined Mabel, "it shouldn't be too hard getting this goop off you guys. My dad would take a bath in turpentine—"</p><p>"I like the sound of that!" Mabel said.</p><p>"-yeah, only turpentine's real rough on your skin and makes you stink. I think we better try what I always use to clean my hands. How much olive oil have you got?"</p><p>Stan, good housekeeper that he was (hah!) knew exactly. "None!"</p><p>"So we'd better go to the store. Soos, will you drive me and Dip? And we'll need lots of the stuff, so drive us to Sprawl-Mart. Stan, we'll need some money."</p><p>"I'm frozen!" Stan said. "The stuff has fossilized me! Can't—reach—my—wallet—"</p><p>"That's OK," Wendy said cheerfully. "I'll take it out of the register. Hey, Dip, I'll get enough so we can stop for a gourmet meal, too, maybe seventy-five doll—"</p><p>"It's a miracle!" Stan said. "I can move! I got my wallet!"</p><p>Dipper called the store and reported that two gallons of the oil would cost about fifteen bucks.</p><p>"How about Stan bucks?" Stan asked hopefully.</p><p>Firmly, Wendy said, "Nope. Real dough. Money, that's what I want."</p><p>In the end, though grudgingly, Stan let them take twenty-five from the register, on the understanding that they'd also buy sandwich fixings for everyone's dinner. They ran their errand, Wendy took her bike out of Soos's pickup, and Soos took off for home.</p><p>And about an hour and a half later, when Stan and Mabel finally emerged from the two bathrooms, Wendy and Dipper had laid out a tray of roast beef and chicken sandwiches. "How do I look?" Mabel asked.</p><p>"Kind of like a seal," Dipper said. "With your hair all slicked down like that."</p><p>"Ha! Look at me, I am the walrus!" She giggled, then added, "Yeah, after I've eaten, I'll shampoo it all—what the heck?" She reached behind her ear and like a self-mystifying magician pulled a lump off her skin.</p><p>"I can do that with a quarter," Stan said around a mouthful of sandwich. "That was one of the features when I did a magic act."</p><p>"It's not a feature, it's a bug!" Mabel said. "Look!" She put it on the table, where it rested inert on its belly. The insect was a dome, round as half a cantaloupe (much smaller, of course), looking a bit like a ladybug but not very much. For one thing, it was bigger than a ladybug but smaller than a giant root borer—about the size of Mabel's thumbnail—and the dominant color was a sort of mustardy yellow, though the top third of the carapace was a shiny black.</p><p>"It's some kind of scarab," Dipper said.</p><p>"I thought it was a beetle," Mabel said.</p><p>"A scarab is a kind of beetle," Dipper told her.</p><p>"Yeah," Stan said. "I heard of them. It's the kind of beetle that sounds like a bell."</p><p>"Sounds like a what?" Wendy asked.</p><p>"You know," Stan said with a grin. "Dung! Dung!"</p><p>"I don't get it," Mabel complained.</p><p>Dipper said, "It's a beetle that rolls pieces of, um, feces up into a ball."</p><p>"Ew!" Mabel said, grabbing two sandwiches. "I think this one's dead."</p><p>The yellow-and-black insect lay on the table, motionless.</p><p>"Probably got fossilized or some deal," Wendy said. "Mabel, don't get grossed out by dung beetles. They really got their crap together."</p><p>"Look," Dipper said. "It's moving."</p><p>On the table, the round body rocked a little. One leg slowly unfolded and came out, then another, and then four more, and the beetle crept about in a small circle, as if waking up from a long sleep.</p><p>"Huh," Stan said, prodding it with a finger. "Look at that."</p><p>"Let it be!" Mabel scolded. "Dipper, do you think this is a bug from the era of the dinosaurs?"</p><p>"Nah," Stan said. "Not the ear. If it's a dung beetle, it might've come out of a dinosaur's—"</p><p>"DON'T say it!" Dipper and Wendy exclaimed together. She punched his shoulder playfully. "Jinx! You owe me a Pitt's!"</p><p>"I was gonna say 'far end,'" Stan said with dignity.</p><p>"Here you go, little guy," Mabel said, putting a pinch of bread in front of the rambling bug. It briefly paused to consider the crumbs, then ignored them and wound its way all over the table.</p><p>"Toss it outside," Stan advised. "Let it hit the long and winding road."</p><p>"It's happier in here!" Mabel said. She rummaged in the trash and came back with an empty but clean peanut-butter jar. "Here you go, little guy."</p><p>"Be careful," Wendy said. "It might sting."</p><p>Mabel nudged the beetle into the jar and then sniffed before screwing on the lid. "No, it doesn't. Not as much as Dipper, anyway."</p><p>"Sting!" Dipper said. "Not stink!"</p><p>"Dip," Wendy said, "Now that she mentions it—"</p><p>"I took a bath a few days ago!" Dipper complained.</p><p>"Take another one!" Mabel said. "Hey, Wendy, I bet the two of us could wrestle him into the tub!"</p><p>"How about it, Dip?" Wendy asked with a mischievous grin. "Wanna take a bath with a little help from your friends?"</p><p>"I'll go," Dipper complained. "Sheesh!"</p><p>Half an hour later he came back downstairs, freshly washed and in nearly clean clothes. "You should do that more often, man," Wendy said when she had sniffed him.</p><p>"I'm a busy guy," Dipper complained. "How's the bug doing?"</p><p>"He's running around in circles," Mabel said. "What should I feed him?"</p><p>"Try him on dung," Stan suggested.</p><p>"Now, where would I get—Waddles!" Mabel exclaimed.</p><p>And that was how, that first night, the beetle had a tiny helping of pig dropping—if it wanted it—and Mabel added a few yarrow blossoms that she dampened in case her new little friend was thirsty.</p><p>Wendy rode off on her bike, promising to check in with Mabel the next morning and to see if she could look up what type of bug they had. "Be careful," Dipper called after her.</p><p>"Thanks, man!" came her voice from the night.</p><p>"Dipper," Mabel said from behind his left shoulder. "Listen, I know you're in love with Wendy—"</p><p>"I'm not in <em>love </em>with her!" he insisted. "I just think she's the most beautiful and coolest girl I ever met. That's all."</p><p>"Well, Broseph," Mabel said, "Try to take a bath at least every other day, OK? If not, you're gonna lose that girl."</p><p>"I'll think about it," Dipper said.</p><hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Beetle Mania</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(July 2012)</em>
</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>2</strong>
</p><p>"Kids!" Stan yelled up the stairs. "Come and get it!"</p><p>Dipper blinked, groaned, and rolled out of bed. "Mabel!" he called. "Wake up."</p><p>"Not yet," she mumbled. "Check back next year."</p><p>Dipper, who had already dressed—actually he had slept in his clothes as usual—went over and shook her. "Come on, Grunkle Stan has breakfast ready."</p><p>"Go 'way."</p><p>Morning had broken, and a beam of light shone through the triangle window. "Get up, Sis. Here comes the sun! Breakfast."</p><p>Grumbling and rubbing her eyes with her fists, Mabel finally sat on the edge of her bed. "What's for breakfast?"</p><p>"Let's hope it's not Stancakes."</p><p>"Yech. Where's my beetle?"</p><p>"What did you do with it?"</p><p>Mabel got up and looked around. "It's here somewhere, in that jar."</p><p>"Kids!" Stan yelled again. "You don't come to the table, I'm gonna give this all to Waddles!"</p><p>"Emergency!" Mabel yelled, jumping up. "Come on, Dip! We can't let Waddles be poisoned!"</p><p>They got to the table, and Stan shoved a plate of scrambled eggs and toast in front of each twin. It's hard to ruin scrambled eggs, but Stan had evidently tried his best to do it. They were runny in the middle and crunchy round the edges. The toast was acceptably toasty, though, the orange juice orange and juicy, and if you picked out the burnt bits, the eggs went down and even promised to stay there. For Stan, that was an A-level breakfast.</p><p>"OK," Stan said. "So today we got two tour buses stopping at ten. I want this place spick and span. Mabel, get dressed, and then you two knuckleheads get to spicking-and-spanning. Where's Soos?"</p><p>"He's not here yet," Dipper said. "It's not even eight o'clock, and he doesn't start work until eight-thirty."</p><p>"Huh?" Stan made a face. "Ugh. My alarm clock's runnin' fast again. Anyways, the early bird gets worms, so get yourselves dressed and then get yourselves busy!"</p><p>Fifteen minutes later, wielding a feather duster and a broom, the twins made the run-down gift shop marginally less revolting. "Find your beetle?" Dipper asked.</p><p>"Oh, no, I forgot!" Mabel said as she hopped off the stepladder. She shook the feather duster, and a gray cloud drifted from it. "Sure was a lot of dust."</p><p>As he watched it settle on the floor he had just swept, Dipper said in a flat voice, "Sure was."</p><p>"OK, I'm finished!" Mabel said. "I'll go get John and feed him."</p><p>As he reswept the dust into the dustpan, Dipper glanced up. "Get who now?"</p><p>"I named the beetle! He has such an honest, down-to-earth face, I named him John!"</p><p>Dipper opened the window and dumped the dust outside. "O-kay . . .."</p><p>"Dipper!" Stan said from the doorway. "Check the ice-cream freezer and move all the sorta melted, deformed ones to the top of the pile!"</p><p>"Oh, man." Dipper closed the window, put away the broom and dustpan, and then re-arranged the mostly frozen treats while Mabel went upstairs.</p><p>She came running down again, peanut-butter jar in hand. "Dipper! Dipper! John's a lady!"</p><p>"Huh?" he asked, standing with his arms wrapped around his own torso and his cold hands under his armpits. "The bug? How do you know?"</p><p>"I've got a feeling," she sing-songed. "Look! Two beetles for the price of none!"</p><p>Two identical yellow-and-black beetles crept restlessly around and around the bottom of the jar. "Oh, wow," Dipper said. "Amazing. I thought there had to be eggs and larvae and metamorphosis and all that."</p><p>"I guess all you need is love!" Mabel chirped. "We've got to find these little cuties a better home!"</p><p>"What's that?" Stan asked, adjusting his red ribbon tie as he entered in full Mr. Mystery regalia. "I told you already, far as your bedroom goes, the attic is it—"</p><p>"We had a blessed event!" Mabel said, holding up the peanut-butter jar. "John's got a son! Or a daughter! Or a brother or sister! Anyway, a fellow beetle. I think I'll call you . . . hang on, I'll come up with something—"</p><p>"Paul," Stan said.</p><p>"Why Paul?" asked Dipper, looking baffled.</p><p>"Paul it is!" Mabel said. "If Dip doesn't like it, it must be good! Hey, how can I tell them apart?"</p><p>"Beats me," Stan said, rubbing his chin. "Except the one yesterday was goin' around the bottom clockwise, so I guess that one's the original. Hey, come to think of it, you know I bought like a dozen aquariums when the Pette Stoppe went out of business. There's a stack of 'em in the office closet. Go see if one of them would work."</p><p>Mabel galloped out. Dipper watched the insects, one going around the bottom of the jar clockwise, one counterclockwise. Each time they met, the counterclockwise one simply climbed over the other and they kept going.</p><p>Mabel returned with a one-gallon aquarium, suitable for a lonely goldfish. "This one has a lid!" she said. She set it on the counter, dusted it off, and scattered some multicolored pebbles—she had jars of these for crafts—on the bottom, then carefully released the two beetles. They didn't seem pleased. They didn't seem displeased. They just kept walking round the edges of the aquarium, not even acknowledging each other when they met, just the clockwise one going under, the counterclockwise one creeping over.</p><p>"Anyway," Stan said, "we know the one goin' around clockwise is John."</p><p>"How do you know?" Dipper asked.</p><p>With a shrug, his Grunkle said, "They're just walkin' around helter-skelter, and when they meet, he's the base." He watched the twins' faces, grinning in anticipation of a laugh that never came. "Too hip for the room," he muttered.</p><p>Mabel got a tiny dish (actually the lid of an olive bottle) for water and one improvised from waxed paper for the bugs' breakfast, remnants of scrambled egg.</p><p>They didn't seem interested but kept walking.</p><p>"They need more light!" Mabel said. She opened the window and put the aquarium up on the sill. It was narrow enough not to be in much danger of toppling off. Dipper said, "We ought to take these to the OSU Extension Service. Maybe they could tell us what kind they are."</p><p>Stan checked the time. "Bugs are bugs. It's five of nine. I swear, if Wendy comes in late one more time—"</p><p>"What?" Wendy asked, sauntering in with her lunch bag in hand.</p><p>"Nothin'," Stan said. "Glad you showed up."</p><p>"Let me put my junk away." She visited her locker in the employees' room then came back. "Hey, you got fish in that?"</p><p>"My beetles!" Mabel said. "Two! Last night, John had Paul!"</p><p>"Sounds freaky."</p><p>Mabel gazed fondly at the aquarium. "Do you think they like their new—Blackbird! Blackbird!"</p><p>Wendy, who'd gone back to her station, hastily grabbed the aquarium and swept it to safety as a muscular blackbird squawked indignantly and sheered off. "Whoa, dude! Mabel, I think the birds are gonna see this as a lunchroom. Better not keep it in an open window."</p><p>Mabel put it on a half-vacant shelf. "They'll be safe here. Did that mean old bird scare you, John? I love you, too, Paul! Aw, they look so grateful!"</p><p>Actually they looked exactly the same, plodding steadily around and around. They never sped up, they never slowed down, they just kept on walking.</p><hr/><p>One good—well, anyway, it wasn't bad, or not too bad—let's say one morally ambiguous thing grew out of the aquarium's presence: Stan made a new exhibit of it. He extemporized a whole rhapsody: "Here—oh, here, ladies and gentlemen, is somethin' you've never seen before! These are rare specimens of the ancient type of beetle called the Spare Ribs! Long thought extinct, these remaining specimens were preserved in tree sap from before the age of the mammals! Living fossils, ladies and gentlemen!"</p><p>"What do they do?" a boy asked.</p><p>"What do they do, he says!" Stan replied with a laugh. "Why, they prevent the world from bein' taken over by dinosaurs! They eat the dinos' eggs! Hah! You see some remains of them on their little plate there!"</p><p>"It looks like regular egg," the kid said.</p><p>"What are you an egg spurt? Ha? Ha?" In the resulting silence, Stan rubbed his eyes and asked himself, "Why do I waste my A material?"</p><p>"Anyway," the boy went on, "there aren't any dinosaurs around."</p><p>"See?" Stan asked. "See what a good job they do?" OK, folks, this is the Mystery Shack Gift Shop. Just browse around, find a souvenir, take something home for the kiddies, and take the kiddies home, too."</p><p>At lunch time, Stan said, "I'm gonna move your bugs to the Museum, Mabel. Wendy! Make up a sign for them that says, 'Unique Jurassic Beetles,' pronto!"</p><p>"Sure," Wendy said. As soon as Stan had hauled the aquarium into the Museum, she said, "Soos, you heard him. Get to it, OK?"</p><p>"Yes, dawg!" Soos said. "Dipper, dude, I can't spell some of that. How about you doin' it?"</p><p>"Oh, man," Dipper said, but he reached for a permanent marker and a sheet of printer paper.</p><p>"Stop! You can't do that!" Mabel said. "This calls for dash, for flair! Not a poky old black marker. It's got to be bright! Dazzling! A carnival of light! I'll do it. Uh—write out the words for me, Brobro." She ran for her art supplies, and Dipper printed the words that Stan had wanted on the paper.</p><p>"Dawg," Soos said in a confidential tone, "I know she's your sister and all, and she loves you and stuff, but she pushes you around a lot. Why?"</p><p>"Because," Dipper sighed.</p><hr/><p>It took her half an hour to whip up the label, and a splendiferous thing it was, too: The letters were outlined in red, yellow, and blue and filled in with multicolored glitter. Replicas of the beetles, made of ping-pong balls cut in half and painted in acrylics, marked the top and bottom of the label, and Mabel had sprayed the whole thing with glue and had liberally sprinkled spangles here, there, and everywhere on it.</p><p>"Here you go, Grunkle Stan!" she said with pride, handing the finished sign over. "From me to you!"</p><p>"This takes me back," Stan said. "You really went psychedelic on this one. OK, it'll attract attention. Where's that peanut-butter jar?"</p><p>"Oh, here it is," Wendy said, reaching down to the shelf under the cash register. "Why do you want it?"</p><p>"Gimme the marker," Stan said. Squinting, he carefully printed on the glass "TIP JAR-KEEP THE BEETLES ALIVE!"</p><p>"You think people are going to put money in there?" Dipper asked.</p><p>Stan's grin was full of confidence. "Sure, kid, after my spiel. 'These are the most endangered beetles in the world! If you care, contribute to their survival. Every little bit you give helps them get back!"</p><p>Wendy rolled her eyes, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I bet you won't make a dollar."</p><p>Stan's eyes narrowed to sly slits. "You think? I'll bet I make twenty or more! You want to put something on it?"</p><p>"Twenty dollars or more. If I win, you double my pay," Wendy said. "If you win, it stays the same."</p><p>"Done!" Stan said. "Ha! Sucker's bet, Wendy, you—wait, what?"</p><p>However, in Stan's world a bet was a bet, and anyhow when they counted up at six o'clock, the peanut-butter jar, which had been mostly emptied twice (Stan explained that you always had to leave a little change and one lonely dollar bill in it as bait), yielded up thirty-one dollars, sixty-nine cents, and an Eisenhower campaign button in surprisingly good shape. Plus one Stanbuck, which made a furious Stan grumble, "Some people are real cheapskates!"</p><p>By the way, the political button turned out to be from the 1952 election and was the rare orange "Oregon for Ike" variety instead of the blue-white-red "I Like Ike" variant, and Stan sold it for ten bucks to a collector, which he claimed should have made his bet double, but that sale didn't happen for a couple of years, by which time Soos was managing the Shack and Wendy's salary had more than doubled, so that was that.</p><p>That night, Mabel carried the beetles up to the room she and Dipper shared, tucked them into a corner with a blanket wrapped loosely around their aquarium, and crooned to them, "Oh, darlings, golden slumbers!"</p><p>"You're getting pretty sappy over those things," Dipper complained.</p><p>"Everybody needs a few words of love now and then, Brobro!" Mabel said. "Don't stay up too late reading and clicking your pen, OK?"</p><p>"But I just started on <em>The Puzzling Jigsaw Puzzle Puzzle," </em>Dipper said. "Maybe read for two hours?"</p><p>"You can't do that! It's already ten and my little sweeties need their rest!"</p><p>"From what? All they do is go around and around day and night."</p><p>"Yeah, they're patient. I'd get tired of doing that myself, around revolution number 9 or so."</p><p>"OK if I read for half an hour?" Dipper asked.</p><p>Mabel thought that over. "OK. But no clicking."</p><p>Dipper put his ballpoint on the bedside table. "No clicking."</p><p>Dipper turned off the lantern at ten-thirty, they both got a good night's sleep, and they both woke up the next morning.</p><p>And they found four beetles creeping around in the aquarium.</p><hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Beetle Mania</strong>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>3</strong>
</p><p>"George," said Grunkle Stan. "And Richard. Or Pete if you think there's another one comin' along. Nah, best be Richard."</p><p>"Shouldn't there be some<em> girl</em> names?" Mabel asked as they watched the four beetles make their endless rounds of the aquarium, two of them counterclockwise, two clockwise.</p><p>"Nah," Stan said. "Unless maybe 'Michelle.' Hey, fun fact, do you know that 'Michelle' means 'Mabel' in French? Only they pronounce it 'Ma Bell,' like the phone company used to be."</p><p>With a broad smile and a nod, Mabel said, "I don't understand any of that."</p><p>"I think you should get rid of them," Dipper told her.</p><p>Mabel's smile turned to wide-mouth shock. "What? No! They're just babies!"</p><p>"There's the Bottomless Pit," Dipper suggested.</p><p>"Listen, Dipper, you can't just toss babies into a hole! Or turn them loose in the woods!"</p><p>"I didn't say let them go in the woods," Dipper said. "But you could take them back to the cave and release them."</p><p>"Worse! A dinosaur might eat them!" Mabel objected.</p><p>"Who brought home a baby dinosaur?" Stan asked, looking wildly around. "Did you? Not me! I deny everything! I don't see any baby dinosaur! Anyway, it was probably Soos. But nobody did that."</p><p>"I doubt that a dinosaur could even see them," Dipper said. "But don't you understand the problem? They keep multiplying!"</p><p>"One, two, three, four, what's the difference?" Mabel said. "More love to go around!"</p><p>"It's more like two, four, eight, sixteen!" Dipper said. "They double every night!"</p><p>"So? How much room can they take up? They're tiny!"</p><p>Dipper got a sheet of paper and a pencil and ruled it off with twelve rows of six squares. "Try this," he said. "Here's seventy-two squares. Pretend that's seventy-two days, all right? Write one in the first square. That's the beetle you started with. Now double that in the next one. Double it again in the third one, and then double for every box. I'll wait."</p><p>When she hit the twenty-first square, Mabel entered 1,048,576, having to squeeze in the numerals, and then said, "That's a lot of beetles!"</p><p>"It's worse!" Dipper said. "Because all the ones before are still there! Don't you see? In just months, these things could scatter all across the country! Across the world! Across the universe!"</p><p>"That ain't good," Grunkle Stan said. "Bugs aren't tourists, and they don't carry money!"</p><p>"Can you explain it again?" Mabel asked, scratching her head with the point of her pencil. "I just don't understand!"</p><p>Dipper wadded up the paper. "I should have known better," he said. "Look, Mabel, the bottom line is that if you keep these things, they're going to take over the world!"</p><p>"Come on, maybe they've stopped multiplying," Mabel said. "Anyhow, they're only the size of peas. Come on, Dip! Give peas a chance!"</p><p>"Seems fair," Grunkle Stan said.</p><p>"In spite of all the danger?" Dipper asked, waving his arms. "At least let me call the OSU Extension office and ask them about these things!"</p><p>"Long as it don't cost nothing, knock yourself out," Stan said. "But do it on your own time! Tourist car in the parking lot! Places, everybody! 'Bout time you hauled in , Wendy!"</p><p>"Hey, it's nine on the dot!" Wendy said. She slipped behind the counter and set her lunch bag on the shelf for the moment.</p><p>"I want you comin' in fifteen minutes early!" Stan said.</p><p>Wendy rolled her eyes. "That'll be the day!"</p><p>"Welcome, folks!" Stan said, beaming at the family of five that had just shuffled in from the parking lot. "You've just entered the home of befuddlement, bewilderment, and bedazzlement! Welcome to the Mystery Shack! The first tour starts in twenty minutes!"</p><p>"What kind of tour?" asked the dad, a kindly man who probably didn't deserve this.</p><p>"A magical, mystery tour!" Stan said, wriggling his fingers. "Special family rate of only twenty dollars! It includes the Mystery Trail, the Mystery Museum, and the all-you-can-buy Mystery Gift Shop! Ta-dah!"</p><p>And so the day began. It turned medium-busy, then slacked off after eleven, as it generally did. Stan was so pleased with the take that he said, "OK, take thirty for lunch, but be back here in twenty-five minutes!"</p><p>Instead of eating lunch, Dipper went into the staff area for privacy and used his phone to look up the number for the Oregon State University Extension Service and called, asking to speak to someone in insects. He was transferred to a chipper-sounding lady: "Dr. Lane here. How can I help you?"</p><p>"Dr. Lane," Dipper said, "are you an entomologist?"</p><p>"Sure am," she said genially. "Got my diploma from Washington State University right here on the wall: Penelope J. Lane, Doctor of Philosophy in Entomology."</p><p>"Then you're the one I need to talk to," Dipper said. "Listen, my sister and I have found these weird beetles . . . ."</p><p>He texted her a macro photo of one of the critters, she told him she was putting the image up on her computer screen, and then she said, "Mm. Yes, unusual. Maybe a squash beetle mutation. Shape's wrong for a burying beetle, it looks closer to a convergent lady beetle, but that one has a more elongated body. The head's very tiny on this one. Any visible antennae?"</p><p>"Just little stubs," Dipper said. "The thing about the beetles, they reproduce real quickly."</p><p>"I'm not coming up with anything in the database. What location?"</p><p>"Roadkill County," Dipper said.</p><p>"Oh, that figures. You folks have some really bizarre mosquitoes out there. Nope, I'm hitting a blank. It may be a new species," Dr. Lane said.</p><p>"Uh, actually I think it's been around for millions of years," Dipper blurted.</p><p>"Well, I meant an <em>undiscovered</em> species," the doctor said. "That's not front-page news, though. There's a new beetle species discovered about once every hour. In what kind of environment did you find this one?"</p><p>"There's a place" Dipper said slowly, wondering how much to tell her. "It's sort of a cavern, and we explored it a little, and I think the bug got caught in my sister's hair. We found it when we got back."</p><p>"Mm-hmm, it's not unusual to find beetles playing in a cavern. I'm afraid it's not an earth-shaking discovery, though. Beetles are very plentiful. Nearly half of all insects are beetles. In fact, beetles make up a quarter of all non-plant, non-microscopic life forms. Did you observe them in their habitat?"</p><p>"No, not until we got home and found one. But I'll try to get back there."</p><p>"I'd love a specimen. Do you want to know a secret? I've always wanted the chance to name a new species! Though you'd really have that right, as first discoverer. Good luck!"</p><p>" Thank you, Dr. Lane."</p><p>"Everyone calls me Penny," Lane said, laughing. "Nice to speak to you—oh, I'm sorry, what's your name?"</p><p>"Dipper Pines?" he said, hearing himself make it a question. People often reacted to his odd first name. "Uh, that's sort of my nickname, but—everybody calls me that. Uh, let me give you my number."</p><p>The entomologist jotted it down and thanked him. "You sound like a bright young man," she said. "I've enjoyed talking to you."</p><p>"Yes," Dipper said. "Nice to talk to me. To you! I mean, thanks. Uh, goodbye." He turned off his cell phone and slapped himself on the forehead. "Ugh! I should have known better! I'm a loser!"</p><p>"Feelin' good today, huh?" asked Wendy, coming into the employees' room for her lunch. "Don't beat yourself up, man!"</p><p>"It's those beetles!" Dipper said. "I wish we'd never found one. Their numbers keep doubling and doubling and if we can't stop it, it'll be the end!"</p><p>"Of what?" Wendy asked, taking out a couple of sandwiches and a bag of chips.</p><p>Dipper waved his arms. "Of everything!" He repeated the demonstration of how doubling once a day very quickly built to millions in hardly any time at all.</p><p>"That's a cool trick," Wendy said.</p><p>Dipper managed a little smile. It was nice to hear Wendy say that anything about him was cool. "You could suggest to Grunkle Stan that he pay you one cent a day the first day you worked and then double it every day after. In a month you'd own the Shack."</p><p>"Ew, who would want to?" she asked. "Maybe if he fell for it I could save up to buy myself a car. I've been wanting a car!"</p><p>"You'll get one someday," Dipper said encouragingly.</p><p>"Or a tank! That would be so cool! Hey, Dip, when you're old enough, you can drive my car!"</p><p>"Thanks," Dipper said. Wendy offered him some potato chips, and they were his lunch.</p><p>
  <em>And the next morning—</em>
</p><p>Mabel counted, "six, seven, eight! Wow! And they've been eating the pebbles! Look!"</p><p>"Mabel, I'm telling you, you have to do something!" Dipper said. He glanced in the tank. Sure enough, the pebbles had dwindled. The beetles never seemed to track across them, but they had cleared an inch-wide path. "They eat rocks! What if they get to be in the billions and they start eating the Earth?"</p><p>"Clarabella," Mabel said, her face screwed up in thought. "Um . . . Eleanor. Julia. And that name that Grunkle Stan said, Michelle!"</p><p>"Mabel!"</p><p>"No, that's taken," she said. "Brobro, don't you think it's time I gave them some girl names?"</p><p>"What does it even matter?" he asked. "They're all just alike! They don't know their names! They won't come when you call them!"</p><p>"Here, Michelle!" Mabel said. "See, she's moving toward me!"</p><p>"There are four of them moving toward you!"</p><p>"Michelle's first in line!"</p><p>"They'd do that if you called them other names! Look! Lucille! Lucy! Sallie Mae! See, they're coming toward me!"</p><p>"Silly, those are the boys! They're just being playful."</p><p>"Please, Mabel, these things are unknown to science. They may be dangerous."</p><p>But Mabel was sprinkling more pebbles, these a distinctive bright orange, along the track the beetles made around the edge of their home. "This way we'll be able to tell for sure if they're eating them. And I'll refill their water bowl."</p><p>Since she set the little bowl down in the center of the tank, and they'd never once seen the beetles set claw anywhere but the edges, Dipper wondered if the insects even drank, or needed to. But about that time Grunkle Stan called them down to breakfast—cereal and milk this time—and Mabel carried the tank down to show him the latest harvest.</p><p>"Hot dog!" Stan said. "I'm gonna put a bigger tip jar next to them. It's amazing, marks will drop bills in a jar for bugs! Hey, I got a great idea! Tomorrow they'll double again, right?"</p><p>"That's the pattern," Dipper said.</p><p>"Then we'll put up some balloons around the tank and have a party! A sweet little sixteen party! The rubes will eat it up!"</p><p>"Why can't I make you guys understand?" Dipper asked, mostly rhetorically.</p><p>"Oh, I understand we got a little creepin' gold mine in these babies!" Stan said.</p><p>"There were four!" Dipper all but yelled. "Yesterday! There were two the night before! And now there are eight! They just go on doubling and doubling! And we ought to stop them, but how do you do it? You don't know! I don't know! Guys, this is a huge problem!"'</p><p>"Your brother didn't drink coffee this morning, did he?" Grunkle Stan asked Mabel.</p><p>"Don't think so. At home he tried it once, and not a second time! He didn't sleep for three days!"</p><p>"I give up!" Dipper said. "Grunkle Stan, I'm gonna take a mental health day!"</p><p>"You're not gonna work?" Stan asked.</p><p>"I need some time to myself," Dipper said.</p><p>"He does," Mabel said in unexpected support. She whispered, "He's got crazy eyes!"</p><p>"I'm right here!" Dipper said.</p><p>"OK, I'm no slave driver. Stay outa my room, though! There's nothing to see there. I'm not hiding anything! So stay out!"</p><p>"I hadn't even thought—"</p><p>"Yeah, there's nothin' there that might interest you anyways. And I'm docking you a day's pay! One buck!"</p><p>"We don't get six dollars a week!" Dipper said. "Only five!"</p><p>"I'm rounding up!"</p><p>Dipper, clenching his teeth against the word he wanted to say—if he said it, Mabel would probably suggest washing his mouth out with soap, and Stan would probably take her up on it—and went to sit on the porch. When Wendy rolled up on her bike, he ran to meet her.</p><p>She swung off and unfastened her helmet. "Dipper, you OK, man? You look kinda shook up."</p><p>"I feel fine!" he said, too loudly. "Uh—Wendy, big favor? Can I borrow your bike?"</p><p>"What for?" she asked. "Don't you have to work?"</p><p>"No, Grunkle Stan gave me the day off—"</p><p>"Shut up, man! You got him to let you off work? How do you do it?"</p><p>"I think I just annoyed him. But I want to ride up in the hills to that cave I was telling you about and see if I can find a way to stop those beetles. They've multiplied again!"</p><p>She knelt on the grass, her green eyes wide with wonder. "Dude, that's a pretty long ways, like maybe ten, twelve miles. You up for that?"</p><p>Dipper felt his heart racing just because her face and his face were on a level and only about a foot apart. <em>Act naturally</em>, he told himself. "I have to be," he said aloud. "I think we're all in trouble."</p><p>She pulled off his trucker's hat and plopped the helmet on his head. "Go for it, dude!" she said. She took her lunch from the bike and waved the pine-tree cap at him. "I'll keep this safe for you. Oh, if the bike's a little stiff to pedal it's 'cause I just changed."</p><p>"Changed what?" Dipper asked, climbing on. It was a girl's bike, twenty-six inches, and he'd never ridden anything bigger than a twenty-four. But he could reach the pedals.</p><p>"Chains!" she answered him. "Hang on, let me fasten the helmet."</p><p>He felt her fingers beneath his chin and quivered inside. "There you are. Go get 'em, dude! I gotta hurry in so's Stan won't yell at me too much. Be real careful!"</p><p>"Hello! Goodbye!" he said. "I'm a little mixed up. If I'm not back by six, have them come and look for me!"</p><p>He rode off, leaving a smiling Wendy shaking her head. "Boys," she said fondly before going in to have Stan yell at her for coming in exactly on time.</p>
<hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Beetle Mania</strong>
</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>4</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>From Notes Made by Dipper Pines:</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>If I hadn't been using Wendy's bike, I would have turned back. I mean, the road to that dilapidated church, with a spooky graveyard not far from it on the other side of the rutted road, is not my favorite place to be alone. And the hills were rough!</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Wendy has a 5-speed, and I got the hang of the gears before too long. She was about right, though. The way to the church was about ten and a half miles, more than half of it uphill (coming back was easier, because more was downhill). On level stretches I hit twenty miles per hour on her bike's speedometer, but chugging up a hill that dropped to two or even one mile per hour, and then I hopped off and walked the bike. My legs are going to be tired tomorrow!</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Nearly two hours after I set out, I came within sight of the old church. The last time I saw it, a geyser had blown most of the roof off, but somebody had patch-worked it with old, warped plywood and scavenged boards, so it had a little better cover than before. But what really surprised me, I saw a thin stream of blue smoke coming out of a kind of jury-rigged chimney, stacked rocks through which, I guessed, a stovepipe ran, since it had that kind of conical cap on it that the Shack's stovepipe has.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I walked he bike into the churchyard. No telling what fearsome creature might have denned up in there—a Tyrannosaur, a Stegosaur, even that gigantic Pterodactyl. So I sneaked up very quietly and spied through a cracked-out corner of a stained-glass window, only to see a bright blue eye staring right back at me!</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I froze in sheer terror, until a shrill, cracked voice said, "Howdy, neighbor! Come right in!"</em>
</p><p>"<em>McGucket!" I yelled.</em></p><p>"<em>Where?" he asked. Then he said, "Oh, wait, that there's me! Somehow I get more forgitfuller every day!"</em></p><p>
  <em>I walked around to the front. He'd somehow got the doors back on their hinges, though the locks and knobs were missing, and with some pushing and scraping, we got one door open enough for me to get in. "I thought the pterodactyl ate you!"</em>
</p><p>"<em>Turn about is fair enough," he said cheerfully. "And I got out o' there. All things must pass, ye know!"</em></p><p>
  <em>I did not want to hear the story of how he got out of the innards of a baby pterodactyl.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Anyway, he was cooking his brunchmafast, which was breakfast and lunch combined, and invited me to have some, but from the smell and the sight of mushrooms bubbling up and seething in the cheese sauce (I hope it was cheese), I gave it a pass. While he ate, I asked him about the beetles. . ..</em>
</p><hr/><p>"Oh, all kinds o' insectamoids scuttles around here," he said cheerfully. "The little fellers you're talkin' about—yaller and black?"</p><p>Dipper showed him the photo.</p><p>"Oh, yeah, I seen them when I dropped my banjo pick down this HORRIBLE VERTICAL DROP!" he screeched. "Then I had to climb down an' git it. Banjo picks don't grow on trees, ye know. And their ain't no banjo-pick vines a-growing near here. 'Scuse me while I eat."</p><p>He gagged and belched, but got the suspicious stew down. "I done got a ropey-ladder rigged up, iffen ya want to go have a gander at them bugs. They ain't nowhere near the dinos, jest in the sticky tunnel. I got to know my way around pretty good, so I'll guide ye."</p><p>When the geyser had blasted through the old place, it had left it mostly without a floor, but McGucket had worked on that and now the passage down into the tunnels and mine was a more-or-less round hole about six feet across. "Fixing a hole ain't hard work," he said modestly. "When ye can round up lots of prime timber. Come with me. We gotta walk halfway across that middle beam. Be real careful, 'cause I get little old dizzy spells sometime. In fact, I want to hold your hand until we git to the rope ladder coiled up yonder."</p><p>It was uncomfortable, and Dipper wanted to—but didn't—close his eyes. Five steps out, much to his alarm, McGucket let go of his hand and did a jig. "I done it without fallin' off that time! Hoo-ee!"</p><p>The rope ladder was bulky, but carefully rolled so when McGucket nudged it over the edge, it unreeled down into the dark. "I'm gonna git my emergency pack," McGucket said. "Jest set down and wait a minute."</p><p>Dipper sat down, gripping the edges of the beam. McGucket leaped over him, shaking the whole timber and making Dipper yelp. "If I fell—" he started to yell.</p><p>McGucket cut him off with a cheerful "Sorry." He strapped on a messy bedroll with tools sticking out at odd angles. "Here, can you tote the lantern? It's right heavy, but we have t'have the light, so you've got to carry that weight if you can."</p><p>After what seemed half an hour of climbing into darkness, McGucket said, "Easy now. I'm down."</p><p>Dipper stepped onto greasy, slippery, muddy soil in the humid, steamy atmosphere of the geyser cavern. The light was bad. "Don't turn on the lantern jest yet," McGucket warned. "Them dinosours don't come huntin' here much, the few that's not sapped up, but let me creep around a little to be shore. I call your name, you come quick! What is your name, by the way?"</p><p>"Dipper," Dipper said.</p><p>"Gotcha. You hear me holler 'Dipper,' you come a-runnin! And turn on the light. You come a-chargin' at a dino with a bright light, nine times outa ten, they turns and runs! One time outa ten, they eats ya! Got some spoons?"</p><p>Dipper didn't even answer.</p><p>"OK, I'm gonna go have a looky-see. My eyes is better accustomed to the dark than yours, probably. Iffen we gits separated, make sure you know how to find the foot of the ladder. Take a big ole sniff." He himself inhaled as if he were in a rose garden instead of a dripping, dark cavern that smelled of farts.</p><p>"There!" McGucket said. "That there aromy of sulfur is strongest right here. Let your nose be your guide if we git cut off from each other. Keep quiet, and turn on the lantern if I holler for light."</p><p>The next ten minutes crawled by like a stunned snail. Dipper shuffled and started at every imagined sound. He'd thought his eyes would adjust to the dimness, but if anything it seemed to grow darker. He started to have the eerie feeling that he had wound up nowhere. Man, he would have killed for just one candle!</p><p>Then from not too far away, McGucket called, "Light 'er up!"</p><p>Breathing a sigh of relief, Dipper turned on the lantern, which blazed astonishingly bright with an intense white light that, paradoxically, blinded him for a moment. "What kind of lantern is this?" Dipper asked.</p><p>"I invented it!" McGucket said proudly. "It's got one of my paranormal batterymajigs in it. Never burns out! Twist the knob a little and it'll get more tolerable."</p><p>Dipper dimmed the light to something less than the intensity of a searchlight. McGucket was standing against a sap-covered wall of the cavern and said, "Come on over."</p><p>Dipper did, squashing through the mud. He saw that it still held impressions of their feet from last time—even the pterodactyl's footprints, like those of a gigantic bird.</p><p>"Hey," McGucket said softly, "let me show you somethin' right pretty." He took the lantern, adjusted the shade so it was more like an oversized flashlight, and shone the beam upward. "Look at that!" he said.</p><p>It gave the impression of standing on the ground and looking up into the dark night sky. The distant round circle of the hatch back into the church might have been a haze-dimmed moon. But all around it blazed constellations of brilliant stars.</p><p>"What are those?" Dipper asked.</p><p>"I thought they was the eyes of bats, at first," McGucket said. "But then I prized some of 'em loose. Them's diamonds, Dipper."</p><p>"Diamonds? For real?"</p><p>"Yep. A-stuck in the ancient clay, my guess from a time when this was all a volcano. Diamonds form in volcanic pipes, you know. And some big old blast busted 'em up and they got stuck there. Imagine. Just you a hangin' there on a rope, loosely in the sky with diamonds! I reckon a feller could get rich, he didn't get et by dinos or infected with primordial diseases. But here, this wall was what I was a-tellin' you. It ain't so runny now the weather's cooled down a mite. This what you're talkin' about?"</p><p>The tree sap had hardened to nearly the consistency of amber again. In the light of McGucket's lantern Dipper saw what looked like a string of beads, thousands of them.</p><p>But they were beetles, trapped in the sap.</p><p>"I reckon the one closest to the surface got smeared up when yore sister brushed past," McGucket said. "And like the dinos, these things don't die when they get sapified. They jest waits here in the dark fer their time to come round again. Want to dig one out?"</p><p>"No!" Dipper said. "I want to put the ones Mabel has back where they belong! I'm going to take a couple of photos. Would you hold the lantern steady?"</p><p>He did, and Dipper did, and then they started the long, long climb back up. "Hey," McGucket said from a few rungs over him, "There's one of them diamonds here in reach. Want it for a souvenir, son? Pretty sure we can work it out. Like I say, they's just stuck loosely."</p><p>"Let's just get back up," Dipper said.</p><p>"I can keep it fer you. I got something somewhere it'll fit in—matchbox. Sure you don't want me to grab it?"</p><p>"Not today," Dipper said. "I have to keep climbing or I'll fall."</p><p>"Don't worry, you tucker out, I'll get you, son."</p><p>That was three-quarters of the way up, and that was when Dipper realized that Old Man McGucket's mind had slipped a cog. He kept calling Dipper "son," and Dipper understood that he meant it literally. But McGucket's son was a grown man—Dipper had met him—and he felt both pity for the old man and fear for what might happen if he lost his mind completely.</p><p>At the top of the ladder, McGucket lay on the timber on his belly and reached down to give Dipper a hand up. "There you go!" he said brightly. "Tell you what, why don't we rest some now, relax, maybe go fishin'? You always loved fishin'."</p><p>Dipper stepped onto the floor and checked himself for bugs or sap. Nothing. "Thanks, sir," he said. "But, you know—I'm not really your son. Look at me."</p><p>McGucket blinked. "Oh. I just saw a face, and I thought—naw, you're not Tate. I fergot he's a man grown now." He shook his head sadly. "Dunno what come over me. Anyways, thanks for visitin' me. It gits lonely up here in the hills. Maybe I oughta move back to town. Rocky must be a-missing me."</p><p>"Who's he?"</p><p>"Her, son," McGucket said. "She kicked so when I first grabbed her, I named her Rockette, but now I jest call her Rocky. Rocky Raccoon. She's my wife!" he grinned and winked.</p><p>Oh, yeah, there were tales about the crazy old coot marrying a raccoon. Dipper hadn't thought they might be true. He got back on Wendy's bike, waved goodbye to the lonely old scarecrow of a man, and headed back.</p><p>Except for a couple of times when the downslopes made him speed up at a terrifying rate, the going back was easier than the riding up.</p><p>He returned to the Shack around three-thirty, exhausted but satisfied that he had found the place where the beetles might be returned.</p><p>When he came in, Wendy said, "Hey, man! Did you make it?"</p><p>"Yeah," Dipper said. "But I'm going to be achy! Wendy, I went down in the cavern and found the spot where the beetles came from. I think sap is the answer. If we can get some and put them in it, it won't kill them, but preserve them. Maybe Mabel will go for that."</p><p>"Guess what!" Mabel herself bawled, galloping into the gift shop. "Where's Grunkle Stan?"</p><p>"Just took a bunch out on the Mystery Trail," Wendy said. "What's up?"</p><p>"Well," Mabel said, "I was upstairs poking through Grunkle Stan's room, because I'm a snoop, and guess what I found?"</p><p>"A baby dinosaur," Dipper said.</p><p>"A ba—no! Silly! What a doofus!" Mabel laughed. "What made you even think that, Brobro?"</p><p>"The way Stan acted so suspicious when he denied having one and said it was probably Soos who brought one home."</p><p>"Sounds like Stan, all right," Wendy agreed.</p><p>"Well, it's not a baby dinosaur. It's a dinosaur egg, just a small one, not like that one that was big as a house! This is more like a football! He's got it in a cardboard box with a heat lamp on it. I think he's trying to hatch it! The beetles will have a friend! That's what I call egg-citement! Yuck, yuck! Why's nobody laughing?"</p><p>Dipper groaned so loudly that Mabel blinked. "What's wrong, Broseph? What would you call it?"</p><p>Dipper answered in one word: "Misery."</p><hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Beetle Mania</strong>
</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>5</strong>
</p><p>Grunkle Stan went shopping that afternoon, and while the beetles—somehow there were sixteen of them now—continued marching round and round in circles, Wendy and Dipper snuck upstairs to see the dinosaur egg, if that's what it was. Stan had locked the door, but it was an easy one to slip. Mabel did it with a butter knife.</p><p>"That's it?" Wendy asked. The oval-shaped, light brownish-pink thing nestled beneath a heat lamp on a blanket in the cardboard box. The egg looked like a medium-large Idaho potato, except smoother and less lumpy. "I thought dinosaur eggs would be, like, huge."</p><p>"This is probably from a smaller species," Dipper said. "I wish I had our computer here! Let me see if I can find anything on my phone."</p><p>"Mom's gonna be nagging you about data charges again," Mabel warned.</p><p>"Let's see . . . it may be something like a Compsognathus. That's a small dino, somewhere between a chicken and a turkey in size. Looks like it's got a long tail, though."</p><p>Mabel took a look. "Aw, so cute!" She patted the egg. "Hello, little girl!"</p><p>"Could be a guy," Wendy said.</p><p>"What? No way! Then the egg would have to be blue!"</p><p>Dipper said, "It may just look kind of pink because of the heat lamp, you—"</p><p>Wendy suddenly turned her head. "Listen, that's Stan's El Diablo!"</p><p>"Quick, everybody out!" Dipper said. He set the lock and they hurried downstairs.</p><p>And a second later, Stan pushed through the gift-shop door and into the kitchen, holding a couple of paper bags. "How's business been?" he asked.</p><p>"Dead," Wendy said. "Nobody since five o'clock."</p><p>Stan sighed, glancing at the clock. "Ten of six. And it's gettin' all cloudy, too, s'posed to rain tomorrow. Might as well knock off."</p><p>"Oh, the beetles doubled again," Mabel said.</p><p>"Good, good, the more bugs, the more money!" Stan said with a grin.</p><p>Wendy was looking into one of the bags. "Hey, you guys want me to cook you a nice dinner for a change? Dad and the boys are off on a logging job until tomorrow afternoon. I could stay and eat with—this isn't groceries!"</p><p>Dipper looked, too. "Two sunlamps?" he asked. "What's up, Grunkle Stan?"</p><p>"I didn't steal 'em!" Stan said, snatching up the bag. "Not guilty! Uh, I haven't been sleeping too good. Achy back. Figured a little heat might help. I'm so tired!"</p><p>The other bag held the usual weird assortment of groceries that Stan always bought (his rule seemed to be that if it was on a two-for-one sale, he needed it), but it was enough for Wendy to cook up a pot of spaghetti with home-made sauce, plus some juicy meatballs and salads all around—although she did have to improvise a dressing from honey and mustard. Stan took the heat lamps upstairs while Dipper and Mabel helped Wendy with the cooking.</p><p>"I know what's going on," Mabel said. "The egg's not hatching. It doesn't need sun lamps, it needs a mother's love!"</p><p>"I've got a feeling you're up to something," Dipper said. "Whatever it is, forget it!"</p><p>"No, it's perfect," Mabel insisted. "Tonight when Grunkle Stan's sound asleep, I'll sneak into his room and tuck the egg against him! He's got that grunkly old-man humidity and heat thing going. That'll do the trick!"</p><p>"I don't like it, Mabes," Wendy said, checking the meatballs.</p><p>"Ha! Now and then I've snuck in and out without waking him up. You'll see, it'll be easy!"</p><p>"You can't talk her out of anything once she's made up her mind," Dipper advised Wendy.</p><p>"Well," Wendy said doubtfully, "if he starts to mumble or stir around, run for your life!"</p><p>"Shh!" Dipper said.</p><p>Stan came downstairs, sniffing. "Smells good!" he said.</p><p>"Hey, Grunkle Stan!" Mabel said. "We got a brownie mix in the cabinet! I'm gonna bake a pan of them, and we can have them for dessert with nice cups of hot milk."</p><p>"Hot milk makes me sleepy," Stan said.</p><p>"Well, you've been saying you're worn out! If you've got trouble sleeping, that's the very thing you need!"</p><p>"OK, sure, whatever," Stan said. "I'm gonna catch the news."</p><p>"Everything will be ready in about twenty minutes," Wendy said.</p><p>Stan grinned. "And she can cook, too! Ha! Don't ever change, Wendy! You got a lot going for you!"</p><p>"Why don't you ever compliment me and Mabel?" Dipper asked.</p><p>"Why don't you ever deserve it?" Stan retorted.</p><p>Oh, well, Wendy's dinner turned out way better than anything Stan had yet cooked.</p><p>Mabel's brownies turned out perfect, not too dry, not too chewy, filling the Shack with that irresistible chocolate aroma. And sure enough, Stan's cup of hot milk set him yawning.</p><p>"Go on, turn in. We'll clean up," Wendy said.</p><p>"You OK to ride home on your bike?" Stan asked her, stretching.</p><p>"Oh, sure," Wendy said. "I got a headlight, the weather guy says the rain won't start until after midnight, and it won't take me more than a half hour, even in the dark. I'm good."</p><p>"Well," Stan said, "If you're sure. OK. Goodnight."</p><p>Pretty soon they heard him snoring, and by the time they'd dried and put away the dishes, Mabel had tiptoed up to his room. Wendy hung on until Mabel came back grinning and giving them a thumbs up. "Mission accomplished!" she said. "Betcha tomorrow Stan will be a mommy!"</p><p>"I'll turn off the lights in the Museum," Dipper said. He came back almost immediately. "They're multiplying again!" he said. "I see how they do it now!"</p><p>They all went to look. The endlessly marching beetles had all become peanut shapes—and as they watched, the thin part of the peanuts shrank and each bulge grew six marching legs. "Oh, wow!" Wendy said. "They reproduce by splitting up like those microscopic things I was supposed to learn about in Biology I!"</p><p>"This is getting worse and worse," Dipper moaned.</p><p>"Just more to love!" Mabel insisted.</p><p>"Look, Mabel," Dipper said, "I've explained and explained! OK, if I were one beetle, that would be all right, I'd be safe to keep as a pet—but four? Eight? Thirty-two? What happens when I'm sixty-four beetles?"</p><p>"And it looks like they've eaten all the pebbles," Wendy said. "Seriously, Mabes, you're gonna have to do something about them."</p><p>"What?" she asked, pouting.</p><p>"The sap," Dipper said. "It doesn't hurt them, just puts them into hibernation or something. There's a lot of it dripping from the surface trees, and whole pools of it down in the caverns."</p><p>"I'll think about it," Mabel said, and that was as far as she would go.</p><p>Wendy went home, the twins turned in, and around five the next morning, Dipper woke up with a bad feeling. He crept downstairs still barefoot, clicked on the Museum lights, and couldn't even count the number of beetles, now in two lines and two layers, still creeping without a pause. At least 128, he thought, if not 256.</p><p>Not only were they multiplying—they sere speeding up the process.</p><hr/><p>And then at five-thirty, while he was trying to roust Mabel out of her bed, Dipper heard his Grunkle's voice: "Waughh! What the—hold still, you—I'll get you!"</p><p>"The egg hatched," Dipper said.</p><p>"Zowie!" yelled Mabel, leaping out of bed. "A day in the life of Mabel Pines! Come on, slowpoke, let's go see the little darling!"</p><p>Dipper, already dressed, followed his barefoot sister to their Grunkle's bedroom, where they opened the door and saw Stan's butt, fortunately covered with boxer shorts. He was trying to crawl under his bed, either to hide or to grab something. "Kids!" he bawled when they came through the door, "run to the other side of the bed and trap it!"</p><p>Mabel leaped to the bed (using Stan's rear as a stepping stone) and bounced. "Come on out, you cutie!"</p><p>Dipper peered under the bed from the far side and saw the frightened creature crouching down in a ball, round eyes gleaming in panic. "You're scaring it!" he said. "Mabel, stop jumping!"</p><p>"Gotcha!" Stan said, and the small dinosaur squawked as it zipped out of sight. "Hah!"</p><p>"Let me see, let me see, let me see," Mabel begged, knee-walking across the bed.</p><p>"Sh-sh, he's just a baby!" Stan said. "Aw, look at that! He musta climbed on the bed even before he broke completely through the shell, 'cause there's shell fragments in the covers! Wanted to be with his papa, yes he did!"</p><p>"Yeah," Dipper said. "Let's go with that."</p><p>"Can I hold him? I won't hurt him! Is he a he? Or a she? How can you tell?"</p><p>Carefully, Stan handed the little dinosaur to Mabel. It was curled up with its long tail wrapped around it, its big eyes blinking as they stared at everything. It made a gurgling, chirping sort of sound and to Dipper it looked as if it bristled with pinfeathers. But then some dinosaurs had feathers, he knew.</p><p>Mabel tried to nuzzle the dino, but it clamped its jaws onto her nose. "Ahahaha," she laughed nasally. "Like a clothespin with little teeth! Hurts, but it's endearing! I bet he's hungry! Let's give him a bottle of milk!"</p><p>"I don't think dinosaurs drink milk," Stan said, scratching his head. "They're like frogs or reptiles or something. This little guy would probably go for some kind of meat."</p><p>Mabel tickled the thing's belly until it chirped, opening its mouth enough for her to pull her reddened nose free from its grip. "Come on, you little chompie-chompums! We'll get oo tum tasty foodies, ess ee will!"</p><p>"This again," Dipper groaned. It was just like all the times Mabel had received a new doll in the period before delighted acceptance became experimentation that sometimes trasnformed Barbies into alien invaders with green skins and antennae sprouting from their bald heads.</p><p>Waddles had come downstairs with Mabel. He took one glance at the dinosaur, shrieked, and galloped back upstairs again. "He just has to get to know Chomps," Mabel said confidently. She now cuddled the dinosaur so it could peer over her shoulder, its head turning this way and that. It seized her neck with its foreclaws and squeezed as if afraid of being dropped.</p><p>"That's right" Mabel said in an encouraging voice. "Hold me tight, but I won't drop you!"</p><p>In the kitchen they practically had to use butter knives like tire irons to remove the dinosaur from Mabel. They put it on the table, and it seemed afraid of the edges, though it clambered around, sniffing and licking. "Yech!" Dipper said. "We'll have to scrub the table with disinfectant!"</p><p>"This ham is old," Stan said, pulling out a pouch of lunch meat. "Eh, so are dinosaurs. Let's see if he's interested. OK with you, Mabel?"</p><p>"Sure, it's not personal!" Before that summer had started, Mabel cheerfully ate ham sandwiches or had bacon for breakfast, but she'd sworn off it, not for reasons of observance but rather out of respect for Waddles after she'd won her pig about sixteen times in a row (same pig, time travel, long story). Stan pinched off a bite of the deli-sliced ham and offered it, and the dinosaur shot out its neck and glommed onto it, gobbling it with enthusiasm.</p><p>"Ooh, let me feed him, let me!"</p><p>"Here ya go," Stan said, handing over the sandwich meat. "Watch out for those teeth, though!"</p><p>"Haha, ouch! Hey, Dipper, go check on Waddles, OK?"</p><p>"Sure," Dipper said. He headed back upstairs and at first didn't see the pig, until he noticed the piled-up blanket on Mabel's bed was shivering. He peeked under, saw the porky little eyes wide with terror, and said reassuringly, "I'll shut the door so it can't get at you."</p><p>Which he did. On the way back, he took a look into the Museum.</p><p>They were gonna need a bigger aquarium. This one was full of beetles.</p><p>When he got back to the kitchen, it seemed that Stan and Mabel were negotiating. "It's an exhibit!" Stan insisted. "Not a pet!"</p><p>"But he loves me!" Mabel said. She was holding the presumably well-fed dinosaur in her lap, and it was curled up and to all appearances was snoozing. "How's Waddles, Dipper?"</p><p>"Scared of the dinosaur. He's wrapped himself up in your bedding and won't come out."</p><p>"A great big serving of pig in a blanket!" Hey, Dinah, would you like a pig in a blanket? I bet you would!"</p><p>The dinosaur snoozed on.</p><p>"I don't like the name Dinah," Stan said. "Besides, I think it's a boy."</p><p>"It's a Compsognathus," Dipper said. "Or something close to one. I found the species on line. I think this one will grow feathers, though, and the sketch has them scaly."</p><p>"Maybe it's a baby Pterodactyl!" Mabel said. "When it grows up, I can ride it! Mabel, Queen of the Sky!"</p><p>"They don't work that way," Dipper said. "This one has four legs. It'll never grow wings. It's a little carnivore. Like a miniature Tyrannosaurus."</p><p>"Well, whatever it is, we'll have today to tame it down a little," Stan said. "We won't get much business on a day like this."</p><p>"What's wrong with today?" Mabel asked.</p><p>"Rain," Stan said. "You don't hear it?"</p><p>Then Dipper did hear it, the steady whiskbroom sound of rain on the cedar roof. He looked outside and saw gray curtains drifting down from the mountains. It was the kind of steady rain that searched out the leaks in the roof and gradually filled buckets and bowls on the attic floor. On such days not a single tourist paid the Shack a visit. Not that they had many of these days, because summer was mostly dry in the Valley.</p><p>"Yeah," Stan said, "gonna be an indoor kinda day. Just like September in the rain, only it's July. S'posed to clear up tomorrow, so then we'll debut our new attraction—Compy the Mini Dinosaur! That ain't quite right yet, but I'll get it."</p><p>"The beetles," Dipper began.</p><p>"They're old news," Stan scoffed. "Maybe little chompy here can eat 'em. Hey, that's the right name—Chompy the Chompasaurus!"</p><p>"Mabel," Dipper said, "the beetles. I got an idea, but—well, let Stan hold the dinosaur for a minute and come and look. I mean we have to do something!"</p><p>Mabel rolled her eyes and gave him a superior smirk and an "Oh, Brobro," but then she went in to take a look at the aquarium.</p><p>And in shock she stood stock-still and gasped, "O. M. Goodness!"</p><hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Beetle Mania</strong>
</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>6</strong>
</p><p>Mabel got a five-gallon aquarium from the ones that Stan had bought. Very carefully, she and Dipper picked up the one-gallon one and dumped the beetles into the larger container. It didn't seem to bother them. They milled around in a seething yellow-and-black pile for a little while, then organized into marching rows of insects—already three deep, walking over the others' backs but in the opposite direction. "Look at this!" Dipper said.</p><p>The beetles had either eaten or worn a rut in the glass bottom of the smaller aquarium. Another eighth of an inch and they would have been free as a bird—and loose in the Shack.</p><p>"They have to go back, don't they?" Mabel asked in a miserable voice.</p><p>"Yeah, Sis. Today. As soon as we can do it."</p><p>Someone came into the Shack, and they heard Wendy's voice. They ran into the gift shop, where she was standing on the counter with the little Compsognathus chittering and leaping up. "Get this thing off me before I stomp it!" she said, sounding angry.</p><p>Stan, now dressed as Mr. Mystery, came in. "Hey, hey, hey! Bad boy, Compy! Come to Papa!"</p><p>Cooing, the little dino ran to Stan's feet and looked up at him in reptilian adoration. Except dinos aren't really reptiles. It's complicated.</p><p>"He tried to bite me," Wendy complained, climbing down and taking off her raincoat. "He did snatch my lunch and ate it bag and all. Stan, you owe me two sandwiches, an apple, and a bag of chips!"</p><p>"Little darling," Stan said, petting Chompy. "See, he's gentle as a lamp."</p><p>"Lamb!" Mabel corrected.</p><p>"Don't even get started," Dipper said. "Grunkle Stan, the beetles are out of control. We've got to take them back to the caverns."</p><p>"What? Break up the group?" Stan asked. "When they turn a good dime?"</p><p>"Not break it up," Dipper said. "I don't mean take part of them back. All of them. They're doubling about every two hours now, and the time's getting shorter. And they're eating through the aquariums! If some of them get out, you'll never catch them!"</p><p>"Eh, we just keep an eye on 'em then," Stan said. "If they bust up and some get out, that'll just be a little band on the run, and we can stomp 'em!"</p><p>"Grunkle Stan!" Mabel said. "I won't put up with that. And—and Dipper's right. I mean, I love the little guys, b-but they don't b-belong in today's world. If they go back into the sap, they can just sleep for another million years or so. I bet a beetle in sap would be a beautiful dreamer, just waiting until the world changes."</p><p>"And Chompy should be a bigger draw," Dipper said. "Come on. What do you say?"</p><p>"Well—he's imprinted on me," Stan said. "OK, yeah, I guess so. But who's gonna take 'em back? It's pouring outside."</p><p>"Dum de dum de dum," hummed Soos as he came through the door, looking like a nineteenth-century lighthouse keeper in a tent-sized yellow hooded slicker. He waved. "Good rainy morning holy smokes there's a dinosaur climbing Mr. Pines's leg!"</p><p>"Soos!" Stan said. "Ouch, don't tear the material, Chompy! Just the man I want to see! Hey, you little rat, claws off my wallet! Hah! He's pickin' my pocket! Look at him! He's such a sweet little honey pie! Gimme the wallet back. Don't you growl at me!"</p><p>"Dude," Soos said, "I'm confused."</p><p>Dipper said, "Stan hatched the dinosaur, the beetles keep increasing, Mabel says we can put them back in the cavern, we need help."</p><p>"Take 'em to the old busted-up church where they can get into the cave, Soos," Stan said. "Hey! No! Bite me, you little rascal, and I won't give you no more hot dogs!"</p><p>The dinosaur seemed to understand, because it reluctantly yielded Stan's wallet and then gave him a big puppy-dog-eye look.</p><p>"I don't know if we can all fit in the pickup with the tank and all," Soos said.</p><p>Incredibly, Stan snapped, "You can drive my car! This one time!"</p><p>Before his grunkle could change his mind about the car, Dipper asked, "Coming, Mabel?"</p><p>She sighed. "Yeah. I want to say goodbye."</p><p>"I'm goin' too," Wendy said. "You won't get any tourists on a morning like this, and I'm not gonna stay here with that lunch-eating lizard."</p><p>"Grunkle Stan," Mabel said, "Don't let Chompy get up in the attic. Promise me. I've got a pig in a blanket up there who's terrified of him."</p><p>"Nah, I'm keeping him in the gift shop for special training," Stan said with a grin as he handed over his keys. "Soos, you drive careful!"</p><p>"Yes sir, Mr. Pines! Heh-heh. He is a cute little dinosaur. Kitchy-kitchy-ouch!"</p><p>"Serves you right," Stan said. "Leave my kitten alone. Is it bleeding?"</p><p>Soos held up a forefinger that the dinosaur had probably mistaken for a wiener. "No, but it felt like the time I pinched my finger in the pliers. Dude, that was dumb of me!"</p><p>It took them about five minutes to get things sorted out. It was raining hard, and Soos drove slowly, the wipers set on high and having a tough time of it at that.</p><p>By the time he pulled off as close to the ruined church as he could, the beetles had doubled again. He obligingly carried the aquarium inside, where the rain was leaking through in so may places it was barely better than outside. There was no sign of McGucket, who had presumably gone back to his old home in the dump, though the rope ladder lay coiled up.</p><p>"How are we gonna, like, manage this?" Soos asked. "I don't think I can hold onto the tank and climb at the same time."</p><p>Wendy looked down. The ladder was long, and so was the drop. "Let Dip and me climb down the ladder," she said. "Then you haul it back up. Make a sling of your shirt and put the aquarium in that, then lower it to us. Then we'll take care of it."</p><p>"Not before I climb down," Mabel said. "I've gotta say goodbye to them."</p><p>"You sure?" Dipper asked. "It can get pretty scary down there, remember."</p><p>"I gotta do it," Mabel said. "Soos can stay up here and—and guard the ladder."</p><p>"Sure thing, Hambone!" Soos said. "And if you guys get in trouble or some junk, just yell and I'll haul you all up. I'll bet I'm strong enough to do that. Like an elevator, dawgs!"</p><p>Dipper hung his flashlight on a lanyard around his neck and he and Wendy made the climb down. Even down there, some rain came splattering in. "Spooky, man," Wendy said as they stepped off the ladder. She gave it two tugs, the signal for Soos to haul it up.</p><p>"Mabel gets us in so much trouble," Dipper muttered. "I'm sorry we dragged you into—"</p><p>A distant roar echoed.</p><p>"Dude, what was that?" Wendy asked.</p><p>"Probably the pterodactyl," Dipper said. "But it's about a mile off and I don't think it comes this way normally. It has its own exit somewhere where it roosts in a kind of big dome cave."</p><p>"I don't like it," Wendy said. "I hope Soos hurries."</p><p>"It'll be OK," Dipper said. "We were down here before."</p><p>The roar came again, no louder, no nearer.</p><p>"Dip," Wendy said, "don't get this wrong, but I want to hold your hand."</p><p>For a second it was hard to breathe. Then Dipper said, "Sure."</p><p>She clasped his hand, and hers felt cold. "Thanks, man. I just don't want to feel so alone down here. Wish he'd hurry."</p><p>Only a few seconds later, Soos called down, "It's on the way, dawgs."</p><p>"Take care of them!" Mabel yelled. "Don't let me down!"</p><p>A full three minutes later, Wendy let go of Dipper's hand and reached up. "I got it!" she called. "Mabes, if you're coming, hurry. It's spooky down here."</p><p>"On the way!"</p><p>"Man, this is already heavier than it was," Wendy said as she took the aquarium out of Soos's improvised sling. "OK, Dip, what do we do? Uh—dude, what's the matter?"</p><p>Dipper snapped out of it. "Uh, nothing. There's huge columns of tree roots over here to the left, and a big pool of the sap was in a hollow under them last time."</p><p>He led her the few steps over. "Wendy, I—uh."</p><p>"Whoof!" she set the aquarium down near the ooze of sap, gleaming amber in the light from Dipper's flashlight. "Yeah?"</p><p>"I, um I—I'm glad that you're down here with me." Recent memories flooded through his mind: Wendy zipping her lip when she exaggerated how he'd banished the ghosts. The first time they'd watched a really bad old horror movie together. Wendy blowing off steam about how her dad and her brothers took her for granted. That time when Dipper had cloned himself, trying to get up the nerve to dance with Wendy. Her often-expressed wish just to get away from the place where she didn't feel she belonged in the high-school crowd or at home and move to the great big city of Portland. How sad it was when Tyrone drank soda and dissolved. And then—after the party had ended, when only Mabel and her two friends and Wendy remained, Soos still gamely playing DJ—how he had diffidently muttered, "Uh, Wendy, I don't suppose you'd like for Soos to play that song you like to much and, uh, you—I mean you and, um—"</p><p>And to his utter shock and joy she had said, "Sure, dude, let's dance."</p><p>The only time, except for the Lamby Dance, that he'd ever—and he wasn't any good at it and he knew it, but she was smiling at him and laughing and didn't care—and for just three minutes while the song lasted—</p><p>"Guys!" Mabel bawled. "I'm down! Where are you?"</p><p>"Wendy," Dipper said, all in a rush, "I just want you to know I'm so happy just to dance with you. That one time." Louder, he called, "Over here, Sis! Hurry!"</p><p>She had to pause to admire one of the geysers—not the one that had blasted them out, but a bubbler—but finally she got there. "What do we do?" she asked in a sad voice.</p><p>"The sap is just flowing down here," Wendy said. "I'll hold the aquarium under it."</p><p>"Goodbye, little beetles," Mabel said, barely keeping back a sob.</p><p>"Not goodbye. Just goodnight," Dipper said, putting his arm around her shoulders. "OK, Wendy. Fill it up."</p><p>The sap oozed. Wendy scooped. The aquarium filled. The beetles stopped moving and, to all appearances, just floated there in the goo. "That's enough," Mabel said. "They're covered."</p><p>"Gonna fill it all the way, just in case," Wendy said. That took about another five minutes. "What now? This is getting' heavy, man."</p><p>"Put it in the pool," Mabel said.</p><p>With Dipper's help, she did, and slowly and majestically, the aquarium sank under the surface, like the Titanic if it had hit a brown-sugar berg and sunk in a sea of molasses.</p><p>"Remember, they're not dead," Dipper said as the shape of the sinking aquarium grew blurry in the flashlight beam.</p><p>"Yeah. I'll just think of them as being in a yellow submarine," Mabel whispered. "Let's go."</p><p>They went back to the rope ladder. Mabel started up first, then Dipper, and Wendy brought up the rear.</p><p>They were about a third of the way up when something made a roaring noise.</p><p>"Hang on, dawgs!" Soos yelled from above.</p><p>He pulled them up hand over hand, an amazing feat. They stopped trying to climb, just hung onto the rungs, but the trip seemed long, long, long. A huffing Soos at last hauled them back into the leaky church. "Wow, what was that roar? A dino?"</p><p>"I think it was just one of the geysers," Dipper said, reaching for his raincoat. "I would've yelled, but I was afraid of falling off!"</p><p>Soos pulled his shirt back on. "I was crazy bonkers scared that it was like a T-bone Rex or some junk."</p><p>"It's raining harder," Mabel said from the doorway. "Everybody put your rain gear on."</p><p>From the hole in the floor came a shattering sound no one could mistake for a geyser—the shriek of some big carnivorous thing.</p><p>"Why don't we do it in the road?" Soos asked, grabbing all the raincoats. "More room!"</p><p>They jumped into the El Diablo, all dripping, and in the back seat Wendy and Dipper huddled close for warmth.</p><p>Dipper wanted to tell Wendy how thrilling it had been to hold her hand those few minutes in the dark. He wanted to thank her for being his friend. He wanted to confess how much he . . . admired her.</p><p>Strike that. He wanted to tell her he adored her.</p><p>But she said, "Dude, you're shivering," and pulled him even closer.</p><p>And he couldn't make his mouth make word sounds as Soos drove through the downpour back to the Shack.</p><p>Mabel didn't even notice what was going on behind her. She chattered about how she hoped in a million years the beetles would get together again on the outside, about how sad she was but how glad she was about knowing them, and about how she wondered how Grunkle Stan was getting along with the little dinosaur.</p><p>That was almost the end of the incident of the beetles and the dino. Not quite but almost.</p><p>Oh, and Wendy's phone went off as they drove back. It was her dad.</p><p>When the call ended, she said, "'Cause of this storm, Dad and the boys are gonna be off for at least another day on the logging job. Man, I hate having to go back home in this rain. It's so lonesome there."</p><p>"Sleep over!" Mabel said. "You and me could double up!"</p><p>"Heh," Wendy said. "Sorry, but I'm so tall that we'd never fit."</p><p>"You could—" Dipper squeaked. He cleared his throat. "You could have my bed. I'll sleep down on the sofa."</p><p>"Dude, you'd do that for me?" Wendy asked, ruffling his hair.</p><p>"Uh-huh" was all he could get out.</p><p>"Sweet. I got a change of clothes in the Shack, so—yeah, why not? I can cook again, and we'd be like a little family!"</p><p>"All together now!" Mabel said. Her mood had changed faster than the weather.</p><p>And Dipper was so happy and so scared and so exhilarated and so anguished that he couldn't trust himself to speak while the car crept slowly through the torrents of rain.</p><hr/><p> </p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Beetle Mania</strong>
</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>7</strong>
</p><p>Stan warned Wendy and Mabel not to stay awake gossiping half the night. "Tomorrow's Saturday, and the rain's supposed to let up," he said. "You know what that means!"</p><p>"A whole new day of adventures!" Mabel said.</p><p>"Ugh. Busloads of tourists," Wendy said.</p><p>"Money!" Stan said.</p><p>"Chirrrrrrp," Chompy said.</p><p>"Squeee!" screamed Waddles.</p><p>"Get him out, Grunkle Stan!" Mabel yelled, wrapping Waddles up in a blanket and cuddling him. "He's scaring my poor pig in a blanket!"</p><p>"Come on, Chompy," Stan said. "I got some raw hamburger just for you!"</p><p>The dino leaped up into Stan's arms.</p><p>"That is seriously messed up," Wendy said.</p><p>"Don't listen to her," Stan said as Chompy licked his face. "You're gonna make Papa Stan a boatload of moolah! Ha! Stan, baby, you're a rich man! You girls go to sleep now!"</p><p>When he had closed the door, Wendy finally changed out of her still-damp shirt and shed her bra. "You think Dipper's gonna mind?" she asked as she pulled on one of his tee-shirts—a clean one.</p><p>"I think he's not ever gonna wear that shirt again!" Mabel said. "He'll probably put a pillow in it and sleep hugging it every night!"</p><p>"Mabes," Wendy said gently, "I'm trying not to let him know that I know he has a crush on me."</p><p>"Huh?"</p><p>"I'm fifteen, he's twelve. Just wouldn't work. I think he's a real cute kid and all, but can you imagine the ragging he'd get if people thought I was dating him?"</p><p>"Oh," Mabel murmured craftily, "it's all about keeping him from being humiliated, huh?"</p><p>"Kind of," Wendy said. "You think if I hung my bra up in the closet it'd be dry by morning?"</p><p>"Not in that closet!" Mabel warned. "Weird stuff happens in that closet. Wait a sec." She got a wire coat hanger and said, "Hook it on this, then hang it on that little nail over the window, see? We can crack the window open, and maybe after the rain stops, it'll dry. If it doesn't, we'll run my hair dryer over it."</p><p>"Thanks." When they were both in bed, Wendy asked, "How does Dipper comb his hair? It's so thick!"</p><p>"He doesn't," Mabel said. "Not ever. He kinda runs his fingers through it. I've tried to comb it before, but I keep breaking off teeth. Of the comb, I mean." She yawned. "Maybe if he had a good brush."</p><p>Wendy turned off the lantern. "Think I'll give him a brush set," she said in the dark. "He'd look so much nicer if he took a little care of himself."</p><p>In a sleepy voice, Mabel said, "He doesn't think enough of himself to take care of himself. Maybe if you hinted. He won't listen to me. But since he met you he's been—<em>yawn</em>—getting better."</p><p>Wendy lay there listening to the rain, which was slacking off, until finally it muted down to just drips from the eaves, and then she fell asleep at last.</p><hr/><p>Down on the sofa, Dipper had dropped off nearly at once, but he had bad dreams. Not nightmares, mind you. Dreams that got him worked up over Wendy. Enjoyable dreams, but bad. In the sense of naughty.</p><p>They were swimming in the pool, only somehow it grew until they were swimming in the ocean, and then Wendy did a surface dive, but when her legs came up they were a fishtail, and he realized that she was secretly a mermaid.</p><p>She came up and kissed him, pressing so close against him that he could feel her seashells against his chest.</p><p>"Got something to show you," she said, holding his hand and swimming down to the sea bed.</p><p>"I can breathe!" he said.</p><p>"As long as I hold your hand," she told him. "Look. Isn't this beautiful!"</p><p>It was indeed, an expanse of corals and anemones, all the colors he could imagine, and the rolling, squirming turquoise reflections of the waves moving over it all. "What is this place?" he asked.</p><p>"An octopus's garden, silly," she said. She leaned close and whispered, "Do you want to know a secret?"</p><p>"Glub?" he asked.</p><p>"Give me my bra!" she yelled.</p><p>And Dipper fell off the sofa, losing whatever inflated interest he'd had. For a second he lay there trying to swim, though he didn't know how, before he heard someone coming down the stairs.</p><p>"Dipper!" Mabel yelled, "stop him and grab Wendy's bra!"</p><p>He rolled over, but before he could get to his feet or even sit up, something landed hard on his chest and he instinctively grabbed it, winding up with an armful of struggling dinosaur.</p><p>The lights came on. "You little sneak!" Mabel yelled.</p><p>"I didn't do anything!" Dipper said.</p><p>"Not you—him!" Wendy leaned over him, and he noticed, my gosh, she was wearing a red tee shirt so tight it showed, like everything, twice, and she was in her, um, her light-green panties?</p><p>And only then did Dipper realize that Chompy held a girl's bra—well, of course it was a girl's, I mean, really, but that's the way he was thinking—clenched in his mouth.</p><p>"Take it away from him!" Wendy said.</p><p>"You get it!" Dipper said. "I'll hold him!"</p><p>It is perhaps telling that at the age of twelve, having never once in his life gotten closer than he was at the moment to a girl's underthings except for the time Wendy hadn't put up her laundry and he accidently lay back on one of her brassieres, Dipper preferred holding on to a scratching, squirming Compsognathus to actually touching something so close to Wendy's, um, what's the word, heart, that's the ticket.</p><p>Wendy took hold of the creature's neck just behind its head and with forefinger and thumb forced it to open its beaky little mouth. She took the bra away from it—"Aw," it complained—and Stan came in, wearing striped boxer shorts and a vest-type undershirt (his normal off-duty uniform) and asked, "What the heck game are you kids up to?"</p><p>"Chompy came upstairs and terrified Waddles!" Mabel complained.</p><p>"And it like climbed the wall and stole my best bra!" Wendy said. "Lock it up, Stan!"</p><p>"Here, let me have him." Stan took the dino away from Dipper, who suddenly realized he was lying there with his shirt rolled up in a kind of tube under his armpits and in his white briefs, which he'd worn for a few days, so they weren't exactly white, and that was it. He grabbed the blanket and pulled it off the sofa to cover himself.</p><p>"Jeeze, it's two A.M," Stan grumbled. "Come on, little fella. Are they scaring you?"</p><p>"That thing's destructive!" Wendy warned.</p><p>Stan shrugged. "Eh, yeah, he ate one of my shoes, but it was just an old brown shoe, no sweat. But I'll lock the bedroom door. You guys—get some sleep!"</p><p>Dipper, wrapped in the blanket as he was, struggled back up onto the sofa. "That was scary."</p><p>"Did it hurt you, Broseph?" Mabel asked.</p><p>"Did it scratch up your chest?" Wendy asked, bending over him and trying to tug the blanket down. "Let's see."</p><p>At the moment, he was thinking only about <em>her</em> chest, so close and covered only by a tight, thin red tee—"You're wearing one of my shirts," he said.</p><p>"Huh? Oh, yeah, just to sleep in. Hope you don't mind." As though suddenly aware of what he was noticing, she covered herself with a forearm. "Well, if you're OK, we'll go back up and, um, comfort Waddles. Thanks for saving my bra, Dip!"</p><p>"You're welcome," Dipper squeaked, realizing he could never ever at any time tell anyone anywhere about any of this.</p><p>It took him a great deal of effort to get over the excitement and get back to sleep.</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>From the notebooks of Dipper Pines:</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>When the tourists began to flood in this morning, we found out what Grunkle Stan had been training Chompy to do. First, he (Chompy, not Stan) danced around the gift shop as Stan played some music on a boom box—rock and roll music. And people snapped pictures and didn't believe he was real, but probably an audio-animatronic critter. They poured money into the tip jar, more than they'd ever done for the beetles.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But the little dinosaur is so sneaky and so quick that over the work day it accumulated a whole pile of cash, wallets, cell phones, cameras, and credit cards! Also some gold-colored watches and a gold chain with an old gold coin on it!</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Stan had been teaching it to pick pockets.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When the day was over, some of the tourists returned and complained they had lost things, and Stan pretended to search and find and give back whatever it was they were missing. But more of them went on their way without realizing they'd been robbed!</em>
</p><p>"<em>Stan, that's not right," Wendy scolded. "You're contributing to the delinquency of a dinosaur, man!"</em></p><p>"<em>He's learning a useful trade!" Stan  insisted.</em></p><p>
  <em>Finally Wendy got ready to leave. "Dad and the guys will be back home sometime tonight," she said. "Listen, Dip, you and Mabel take care with that animal around. Oh, when I get home, I'll do laundry, and I'll bring your tee shirt back to you tomorrow."</em>
</p><p>"<em>Please don't," I heard myself saying. "Uh, go to the trouble. Because I'd rather just keep it. Here. I mean."</em></p><p>
  <em>With a funny smile and a shake of her head, she pulled the shirt out of her bundle of clothes and handed it to me. "Man, promise me you'll start taking a shower like every other day at least, and do your laundry. You'd be an attractive dude if you took better care of yourself. Some girl will fall in love with you one day."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I was so close to blurting out something foolish. I started, "If I fell—uh, I mean—uh, see you tomorrow."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She left and I just stood there in the doorway watching her riding away on her bike. Even from behind she's beautiful.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Mabel came up and looked over my shoulder. "I don't want to spoil the party, Brobro, but we have to persuade Grunkle Stan to turn that thing loose. Waddles is becoming a permanent pig in a blanket!<br/></em>
</p><hr/><p>Persuading Stan was easy for Mabel to say, not so easy for her and Dipper to do. The next day Chompy repeated his performance. However, Stan couldn't find any of the loot after the Shack closed—and Wendy reported that the cash register had been emptied, too.</p><p>Eventually they tracked Chompy down to a hall closet. "Dudes," Soos said, "he's like made a nest! And it's probably worth more than the Shack! Boom, that just came to me."</p><p>The dinosaur, like a dragon in miniature, had piled up coins, bills, trinkets, whatever it had stolen, on a mound in the broom closet and curled up atop its hoard. It hissed whenever anyone—even Grunkle Stan—tried to coax it out. When it wouldn't even come out for a T-bone steak, Stan admitted, "This is serious."</p><p>It took some doing, but Stan finally sent Soos to the hardware store to purchase a sturdy steel cage and with great effort they finally lured Chompy inside, the bait being cash and credit cards. Stan had first tried a heirloom gold pocket watch that Stan had said had been his grandfather's before him.</p><p>"Yeah," he explained, a little misty-eyed. "When the old man knew he was on his deathbed, he called me to him and sold me this watch."</p><p>Chompy refused to be tempted, and that was Stan's first intimation that the watch and chain were only gold-plated.</p><p>But at last they had trapped him, and Stan reckoned that overall, they made a profit—once his hoard was fair game.</p><p>"What are we going to do with the little dawg, dawgs?" Soos asked. "Dump him in the sap?"</p><p>Wendy and Dipper looked at each other and shuddered. Go back to the ruined church and the dark caverns? Not after the threatening screeches they had heard.</p><p>Then Wendy's expression brightened. "Dudes, I know! Farmer Sprott!"</p><p>"Yeah!" Mabel said. "He's got all kinds of scary animals! Eight-legged cows! Those eyeball bats that nest in his barn! Let's go see him!"</p><p>They did, and Sprott—who wore an anachronistic flat straw hat, the kind that hep guys thought were the bee's knees back in 1929—and who had an out-of-place New England accent, said, "Ayup, if the girls don't mind him, I could probably use an ugly rooster. That is, if the price is right."</p><p>"How about free?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Then maybe a little somethin' to boot," Sprott said.</p><p>"You're a hard man," Stan complained, but he threw in twenty bucks so Sprott could buy some quality dog food.</p><p>Sprott called, "Heah, chick-chick-chick," and a mob of twelve dangerous-looking hens muscled up, snarling and baring their teeth. "What do ya think of this, ladies?" Sprott asked, opening the cage.</p><p>Chompy stalked out—he did sort of move like a chicken on those two muscular legs—and the hens blinked at him, unruffled their feathers, clucked, and cackled. Then they mobbed him and hustled him away.</p><p>"Reckon he'll do," Sprott said. "If he survives the night."</p><hr/><p>Well, all things must pass. Anywhere else in the world, such strange events would happen only once in a blue moon, but Gravity Falls is special. Every little thing that occurs there is likely to turn weird. Dipper kept that one particular tee shirt separate from the others he owned and never wore it again, though he did not put a pillow inside it and sleep with it. Every now and then he just took it out of the drawer and gazed at it, feeling glad all over that Wendy had once worn it. He sometimes would whisper, "I woke up, I saw her standing there, and there was a dinosaur on my chest."</p><p>His romantic feelings sometimes got a little confused. Mabel got over her beetles mania—Waddles had to recuperate from the shocks he'd had, and taking tender care of the pig, she gave him real love, the kind only Mabel could give to a swine, to make it up to him.</p><p>Other things came along—Wendy discovered Gideon sneaking a tube of her moisturizer from its shelf under the cash register one morning and, though they had not even been formally introduced, she whacked him over the head with a broom and chased him out. There was the odd case of people developing a kind of amnesia, a puzzle that Dipper knew they had to solve. Then came word of a ghost in the Northwest place, that kind of thing.</p><p>But about three weeks after they'd re-homed Chompy, Mabel took a phone call and turned to Dipper and Wendy, her eyes dancing with excitement. "That was Mr. Sprott! He says that Chompy's the first rooster that his hens haven't eaten, and now they're all romancey and everything, and when the first eggs hatch, I can have the pick of the litter!"</p><p>"No!" both Wendy and Dipper exclaimed together. They stared at each other, then with a shy grin, Dipper said, "Jinx!" and gave Wendy such a light shoulder punch that not even one of the beetles could have felt it.</p><p>"Hey, dude," she whispered with an affectionate smile, "that means a lot to me."</p><p>Yeah, yeah, yeah.</p><hr/><p>The End</p>
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